Land Acknowledgement
1. What is a Land Acknowledgement?
A land acknowledgement (also called a territorial acknowledgment) is a formal statement that recognizes, respects, and honors Indigenous communities as the traditional stewards of the land. A land acknowledgement draws attention to the ongoing violent exploitation of land, life, and labor that particularly impacts Indigenous and Black people.
While the practice of developing and delivering a statement can be a tool in establishing relationships with Indigenous peoples, that practice should also include further education and action toward decolonization. Land acknowledgements can help colleges and universities act for racial justice and reimagine the ways land grant universities in particular might serve the communities of their states.
Land acknowledgments have become commonplace as a method of calling classes, meetings, and organizations into action and have been adopted by institutions all over the world. Our goals for offering this statement are to remind us of the enduring histories of Indigenous people and land, to confront the ways we have been complicit with colonialism, and to recommit to decolonial thought and practice.
We also insist that land acknowledgments at Clemson recognize the lived experience of enslaved people, people conscripted to convict labor, and racialized people subjected to the ongoing material and ontological violences of white supremacy. In addition, we understand land acknowledgments as opportunities to think again about what land is and what it means beyond colonial frameworks like the university, the state, the nation. And further to understand that, via the land grant system and the global project of U.S. occupation, in order for Clemson to exist, people and ecosystems have been displaced across the Americas and the world.
2. Historical Overview
At the opening of the sixteenth century, the Cherokee occupied a large portion of what is today the eastern United States. With a population of about 50,000, they called themselves Ani’-Yun’wiya, the “Real or Principal People.” The Cherokee lived in numerous villages spread throughout the fertile valleys located on both sides of the southern Appalachian Mountains, including the lower valley carved by the Seneca River, which formed the natural basis of Cherokee agriculture and commerce in this region.
Understanding how and why the Cherokee would be displaced from this area we know as Clemson in particular, and the Upstate in general, carries the story forward to 1777 and the Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner, which concluded the war that erupted in 1776 between the Cherokee and upcountry settlers during the American Revolution. The treaty followed the large military expedition of the Continental Army deep into Cherokee country. During the campaign, Andrew Pickens participated in a ruthless attack on the lower Cherokee villages. Seeking relief from these devastating circumstances, Cherokee leaders sued for peace at Dewitt’s Corner and signed an agreement to surrender nearly all of their holdings in South Carolina, including the town of Isunigu (anglicized as Esseneca), which encompassed the land on which Pickens’ Hopewell Plantation, and subsequently, Clemson University, would be built.
When placed in a larger historical context, however, this treaty represents just one episode in a long and complicated story of Cherokee dispossession of land. While a detailed recounting of the relationships that developed between Cherokees and European newcomers reveals a convoluted pattern of amity and hostility, overall the relationship transitioned from partnership to conflict during the 1750s. It was not long after the founding of Charlestown (later, Charleston) in 1670 before the two groups became increasingly drawn together in a mutually beneficial trading complex in which commodities sourced from Cherokee country—such as, deerskin, acorns, baskets, and even Native American slaves—were conveyed by intermediary Native American traders to the coastal city where they were exchanged for kettles, metal tools, textiles, and other European manufactured goods. Sustained face-to-face contact between Cherokees and Carolinians began in earnest when the former lent their military assistance to the latter during the Yamasee War in 1715. This partnership provided the colonists with useful intelligence of a tribe of roughly 60 villages stretching from the river valleys and foothills around us here today to the Overhill locations in Tennessee.
While a wave of epidemics in 1685 sharply depleted their numbers, by 1715 the Cherokee had a recovering population of 12,000. With robust industries in agriculture and basketry (managed by Cherokee women) on the one hand and with effective hunters and warriors (the expertise of Cherokee men) on the other, the Cherokees represented an attractive economic and military ally in a region that was, by this time, increasingly attracting the attention and influence of multiple rival factions. Survival, much less prosperity, required for both natives and newcomers alike, the formation of large-scale alliances for out-leveraging others in accessing and controlling trade goods.
White rice cultivated from enslaved people was, of course, the economic engine of colonial Charlestown. Yet, by 1747-48, trade goods originating from Cherokee country represented nearly half of the port city’s total value of exports. Thus, as policymakers in Charlestown nervously considered the future of South Carolina, they looked to the West. Here they saw the Cherokee, who were not only sources of lucrative trade goods and formidable military allies; they occupied lands that stood at the nexus between two significant watersheds. Drawing the Cherokee into the political and economic orbit of South Carolina would thus extend the colony’s influence to the Mississippi River (over and against English rivals to the north, Spanish rivals to the south, and French rivals to the west). Thus, as the longtime governor James Glen would state, “Their Country is the Key of Carolina.”
While the Cherokees faced the same kinds of imperatives of survival and prosperity as their English counterparts did, it was the natural and geopolitical advantages afforded by their location that enabled them to maintain leverage—and with it, economic and political autonomy—in their trade relations with Europeans. By keeping the lines of diplomacy open in all directions, the Cherokees established their independent footing in a system of diplomacy that played one European rival off the other.
This middle ground of mutual accommodation between Cherokees and Carolinians began to collapse in the 1750s on account of events surrounding the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The French defeat sharply diminished the “playoff” options for Native Americans east of the Mississippi River. Furthermore, racial violence erupted along the trans-Appalachian frontier, where settlers set out on indiscriminate murderous rampages against all Native Americans. Among the victims were a number of Cherokee men who had traveled north to support the British war effort. On their way home, unsuspecting groups of warriors were ambushed and killed by white settlers in western Pennsylvania and Virginia. News of these atrocities sparked a cycle of retaliatory violence between Lower Town Cherokees and neighboring settlers. South Carolinians’ anxieties surrounding Cherokee uprisings merged with their increasing fears of African American revolts—peaked by rumors of a “red-black” military uprising—to shape a new future vision for South Carolina: a vision that was no longer based on partnership, but by division and eventual removal.
Thus, by the time of the American Revolution, upcountry settlers were engaged in longstanding hostilities with the Cherokee in open defiance of the British government. Animated by ideologies of ethnic and racial supremacy, which served their economic ambitions and anxieties, settlers sparked violence along the frontier—in some cases, ambushing and murdering unsuspecting Cherokee—in an effort to disrupt and dislodge Cherokee control of the Upcountry. Instead, such atrocities prompted deadly, increasingly-coordinated Cherokee reprisals that threatened to draw all of South Carolina into the conflict. Anxious to both protect its colonial investments in North America and avoid being drawn into costly military conflicts, the British government eagerly sought treaties with formidable Native American nations, like the Cherokees, that entailed the recognition and enforcement of western limits of settler migration. Under these challenging circumstances, the settlers enthusiastically turned to the new government in 1776 to provide them with military assistance while at the same time providing them with the ideological cover to steal the land of “savages” in the name of liberty. The U.S. government, in turn, gained the allegiance of a large block of settlers in a state riven by civil war between Patriot and Loyalist partisans. Such patriotism was, in large measure, purchased by the land wrested from the Cherokee (in this case) by a violent military assault followed by (short-lived) promises voiced at DeWitt’s Corner of lasting peace and reconciliation. Accordingly, the portion that surrounds us today at Clemson was awarded to Pickens in 1784 for his military service during the Revolution. Having led the South Carolina Militia in pivotal battles against both Cherokee and British opponents, and rising to the rank of Brigadier General, Pickens, at this new stage of his life, turned to a new career as statesman and politician as well as caretaker of his new property, which he named “Hopewell.”
Ironically, in the wake of the Revolution, the same political dynamic reemerged between Cherokees and frontier settlers, and the rival governments that were drawn into the conflict on opposing sides. Consequently, national patriotism would be, to a large extent, short-lived in the Upcountry as the new government, having won independence, adopted (for the same reasons) the peace-seeking diplomatic posture of the administration it had just overthrown. One of the first such diplomatic achievements was arranged with the Cherokee in 1785. Signed under an oak tree on a bluff overlooking the Seneca River (which now forms a small peninsula on campus at the edge of Lake Hartwell), the Treaty of Hopewell, orchestrated in large measure by Andrew Pickens, established the western boundary of American settlement that abutted Cherokee territory. Yet, at this point in time, Pickens’ bearing toward Native Americans, much like that of the U.S. government’s, had reversed itself. Now firmly situated on 1133 acres of land abutting Cherokee territory (that had receded west from the arrangements made at DeWitt’s Corner), the retired general now had little to gain and much to lose in the event of renewed hostilities with his neighbors, including the more distant Choctaw and Chickasaw with whom two more treaties were arranged at Hopewell in 1786. Once again, however, as regular settlers in the frontier borderlands covetously looked upon this western land, they turned to local government to provide them with the military, legal, and ideological cover to invade it. Thus, while flaunting the boundaries that the U.S. government had promised at Hopewell to honor in perpetuity, South Carolina and Georgia settlers relied on their respective state governments to contest the authority of the federal government in the name of “states’ rights.”
Over the decades following the Hopewell treaties, rather than confronting the defiant settlers in defense of its peacemaking policy with Native Americans, the federal government reasserted its authority in the frontier by backtracking from the plan. On the one hand, members of the federal government lacked the political courage to stand up to settlers and their state politicians who were quick to stoke time-honored embers of secession. The prospect of sparking civil war—another revolution—inclined federal policymakers to pursue options of appeasing instead of provoking the settlers. On the other hand, the new administrative structure established by the Constitution emboldened the federal government to expand its authority over contested space that existed outside the confines of state boundaries. Setting the precedent of future administrations, the first president utilized his newly acquired cabinet power to chart a new course that tied “Indian” policy, tellingly housed under the Department of War, to the Treasury. Thus, beginning in 1788, the federal government increasingly moved toward a duplicitous, self-sustaining militant “Indian” policy that opened new land for white settlers through military excursions into Native American territory—excursions paved in advance by settler violence and punctuated by treaties in which land was surrendered to the U.S. in return for its empty promises to halt the next wave of settler incursions. Fueling the momentum of this white American demographic takeover of the West, the federal government, in turn, promptly surveyed and sold much of this land to a growing market-oriented settler population that eagerly flooded into these regions to mine untapped resources for shipment and sale in the East. Such land sales not only covered the military costs of inflicting the violence, intimidation, terror, and/or bloodshed necessary to draw Native American nations into treaty negotiations; it supported and incentivized a more expansive invasion of the West that would be popularly understood, by the mid-nineteenth century, as the providential course of the nation. Representing yet another layer of ideological deception—and more fuel to the fires of white expansionism--the religious patriotic rhetoric of Manifest Destiny belied the dishonorable, underhanded, self-serving, racist methods (and motivations) of American expansion.
Consequently, following the Hopewell Treaty of 1785, the U.S. government enabled a fraudulent takeover of Cherokee land through a series of dust-up treaties—each articulating a fresh set of false promises while erasing the provisions that had been violated since the previous treaty. Thus, with each round of settler hostility and federal government treaty-making, the Cherokees saw the diminishment of their territory. This attack on Cherokee sovereignty came to a tipping point during the 1820s with the political ascendancy of Andrew Jackson who championed the American settler. Accordingly, President Jackson along with his supporters in congress directed the federal government to ignore its treaty obligations with Native American nations and stand out of the way of states’ efforts to assist settler encroachment into their territories. This political tide culminated in the passage of the Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the president to make the necessary arrangements to relocate Native American nations to so-designated “unsettled” land west of the Mississippi River. The subsequent diplomatic pressures divided the Cherokee people in more ways than one across a fluid range of reactions from grudging compliance to steadfast defiance. Jackson exploited this division by coaxing leaders of an unsanctioned, minority faction that supported removal negotiations (in light of its inevitability from their perspective) to sign the treaty of 1835, which provided a two-year grace period for the remaining Cherokee (the bulk of the nation) to vacate their ancestral lands in the Southeast. Although the treaty would be approved by the Cherokee Council the following year, the vast majority of the people, staunchly opposed to relocating, refused to do so by the voluntary deadline. In response, President Van Buren ordered the U.S. Army to use force if necessary to bring about their compliance. Thus, in the winter of 1838, roughly sixteen thousand Cherokees were rounded up at gunpoint and ordered to embark on the five-thousand-mile trek to Oklahoma. Suffering from exposure, disease, and exhaustion, roughly four thousand Cherokees died from the harsh conditions of the Trail of Tears death march.
Estimates suggest that while roughly 15,000 Cherokee moved to Oklahoma Indian Territory, roughly 1,500 avoided removal from the Southeast, including the roughly 800 Cherokee located near the Oconaluftee River of North Carolina, whose descendants would gain federal recognition in 1868 as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. As indicated by the 2000 census, today well over 8,000 Cherokee continue to live within this remaining bastion of Cherokee traditional homelands. Outside this territory, thousands of (culturally and politically engaged) Cherokee descendants live in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere throughout the Southeast (and beyond).
3. Model Statement
We acknowledge that the main campus of Clemson University occupies the traditional and ancestral land of the Cherokee People. Clemson’s main campus is built on land seized through US military and diplomatic incursions culminating in the Treaty of Dewitt’s Corner in 1777. This is also land on which people enslaved by the Pickens, Clemson, and Calhoun families lived and worked, and that was transformed into the campus of Clemson University through convict labor.
We make this acknowledgement to remember the histories of violence that anticipate our gathering here, to recognize Indigenous and Black claims to life and land, and to recenter those claims as we commit to better ways of caring for each other and for this land.
Along with this acknowledgement, we ask: what responsibilities and commitments can we make to foster more honest and generative relations with this land and with each other? Can we, wherever we go, acknowledge Indigenous claims to the land we occupy? Can learning about the lifeways and lifeworlds of the original and rightful caretakers of the land we occupy guide our own changing relation with the places we are and the communities that belong to those places? How can we share our learning with others?
4. Guidelines for Designing a Land Acknowledgement for your Organization, Class, or Meeting
The following questions are designed to help you organize a conversation in your campus organization or class meeting about whether and/or how to develop a land acknowledgement of your own. These six questions are designed to help your group gather information about the different kinds of knowledge, experience, and goals its constituents bring. Further, these questions are designed to facilitate an intentional decision about whether/how a land acknowledgement might help ground your organization’s work or class content in the histories of power, violence, collaboration, and survival specific to this land.
How/does your syllabus or mission statement acknowledge or engage with Clemson’s history?
Do you have any course components that may cover issues of power, violence, collaboration, survival, sustainability, land use, etc.?
Does your mission statement contain any information or values about how humans are to relate to one another?
What specific experiences or knowledges can your members contribute to the organization’s engagement with Clemson’s history?
What do you want to learn about the history of the land Clemson occupies?
How/does the model acknowledgment affect your group’s goals for this meeting?
Do you want to write your own land acknowledgement? Why or why not?
How can your group’s land acknowledgement help you make or achieve your goals?
Further Guidelines for Taking Action
Reflect: How is your pedagogy/approach to teaching rooted in the logics of property, discovery, external control, dispossession, and entitlement that underlie historic and continuing colonization?
Learn: Internal: What do you know about your institution’s relationship with The Cherokee Nation, The Eastern Band of Cherokee, and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee? What should you know and where might you go to learn it? As an uninvited guest to Cherokee lands, what responsibilities do you have according to Cherokee traditions and practices?
External: As you travel for business, conference, family, or pleasure, what can you learn about the rightful and traditional caretakers of the land you occupy? What responsibilities might you take up as a guest on those lands? What community issues or happenings are connected to your purposes for visiting?
Advocate: How are you positioned within the institution and your circles of influence to support restitution and land rematriation? How can you contribute monetarily to Cherokee wellbeing and economies (property taxes, supporting indigenous artists, patronizing indigenous businesses)?
Relate: What continuing indigenous land or water rights are happening/disputed in your state and how is the institution connected? What indigenous knowledge systems, ontologies, and sources are you engaging in your scholarly role?
5. Additional Resources, A Growing List
Hayden King on the limits of Land Acknowledgement Statements. CBC. Accessed: 8/13/2020
“Guide to Acknowledging First Peoples & Traditional Territory.” CAUT: Canadian Association of University Teachers. Accessed 4/23/2019
“#HonorNativeLand--A Guide to Respectfully Acknowledging Ancestral Lands.” U.S. Department of Arts and Cultures (a nonprofit community group). Accessed 4/23/3019.
âpihtawikosisân, “Beyond territorial acknowledgments.” September 23, 2016. Accessed 4/23/2019.
“Decolonize McGill” The McGill Daily.” Accessed September 21, 2016. \
Bob Joseph, “First Nation Protocol on Traditional Territory.” Accessed September 21, 2016.
Justin Wiebe and K. Ho, “An Introduction to Settler Colonialism at UBC: Part Three.” The Talon, October 13, 2014.
Jennifer Matsunaga, “Thinking Outloud about the Guide to Acknowledging Traditional Territory.” Reconciling Truths and Accounting for the Past, May 27, 2016.
“Territorial Acknowledgment as an Act of Reconciliation.” KAIROS Canada, August 6, 2015.
“Why Toronto Public Schools Now Pay ‘Very Necessary’ Daily Tribute to Indigenous Territories.” CBC News. Accessed September 22, 2016.
Sample Land Acknowledgement Statements from U.S. Universities